Hunt-Morgan House

Built in 1814, this Federal-style mansion was home to John Wesley Hunt, Kentucky's first millionaire, and later to his great-grandson, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan, the "Thunderbolt of the Confederacy."

The Hunt-Morgan House, historically known as Hopemont, stands at 201 North Mill Street in Lexington's Gratz Park district, one of the finest surviving examples of Federal architecture in Kentucky. It was built in 1814 by John Wesley Hunt, who had moved from Richmond, Virginia, to Lexington in 1795 and amassed a fortune through mercantile ventures, thoroughbred horse breeding, hemp manufacturing, banking, and insurance — becoming the first millionaire west of the Allegheny Mountains. The house later became home to Hunt's grandson, Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan, the "Thunderbolt of the Confederacy," whose daring cavalry raids behind Union lines during the Civil War made him one of the conflict's most legendary figures. Morgan was killed in Greeneville, Tennessee, in 1864 at the age of 39. The house was also the birthplace, in 1866, of Hunt's great-grandson Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan, known as the Father of Modern Genetics, who became the first Kentuckian to win a Nobel Prize when he received the Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933.

The hauntings at Hopemont are rooted in two very different stories of devotion. The first ghost belongs to John Wesley Hunt himself. Hunt died suddenly of cholera in 1849, struck down by the epidemic that ravaged Lexington. Visitors and museum staff have reported seeing his apparition walking the halls of the home he built, a spectral figure moving through the rooms where he once held court as the wealthiest man in the western frontier.

The second and more poignant haunting involves Bouviette James, known to the family as Aunt Betty or Mammy Bouviette. She served as the family's housekeeper and nursemaid during the mid-nineteenth century, caring for the Morgan children with such devotion that the family held her in deep regard. When Aunt Betty died shortly after the Civil War, Charlton Morgan and his brothers served as her pallbearers, and she was buried in the family plot — a nearly unheard-of honor for a Black woman in that era. The family had also gifted her a treasured pair of distinctive red leather shoes.

But Aunt Betty's care for the children did not end with her death. According to the most detailed account, one of the Morgan children fell severely ill after Aunt Betty's passing. A nurse attending the sick child fell asleep at the bedside and awoke to see a Black woman wearing a turban and red leather shoes standing over the child, stroking the child's forehead and humming a nursery rhyme. When the nurse moved toward the figure, it vanished. The child subsequently died. When Mrs. Morgan learned about the apparition — and the red shoes that matched the pair the family had given Aunt Betty — she was convinced that Aunt Betty was still watching over the children, and that she would continue to care for her charge in the afterlife.

To this day, Aunt Betty's ghost is most frequently reported on the third floor, in the nursery and hallways where she once tended to the Hunt and Morgan children. She appears most often to those who are sick, still drawn to comfort the ailing as she did in life. Her distinctive red shoes remain her identifying mark across nearly two centuries of sightings.

The house was saved from demolition in 1955 and is now operated as an interpretive museum by the Blue Grass Trust, furnished with original Hunt and Morgan family pieces and housing the Alexander T. Hunt Civil War Museum. Tours are available, and the house is included on Lexington's ghost walk circuit through the historic Gratz Park district.